The Villa
by ShatteredLyre
Summary: Hana rested his head on his hand and chewed the end of his pencil thoughtfully. “Say, dad, how did you and mom even meet?” Yoh laughed uncomfortably. "Er...The first time we met or the second time?" ONESHOT


**A/N**: so in my AP English Literature class, we just finished reading _The English Patient_ by Michael Ondaatje and needless to say, his beautiful control and choice of language really inspired me. after working on this one shot for weeks, I am pleased to present you _The Villa_! (if you've been keeping up with my series of short one-shots, _My Commensal_, here is the story I promised you all!)

This is the closest I have ever gotten to writing how I want to write and I am very very happy with it. I've always thought that the Shaman Tournament was very similar to a war: all of them fighting to gain control over everyone else. Not to mention, what happened right after Hao left isn't really explored in _Shaman King_. So I took that idea and expanded it.

**Disclaimer:** Phew, never needed any of these in a while. **I do not presume to own or have written the quotations in italics. They are the property of Michael Ondaatje and Random House and Vintage Publishing**. i am only borrowing his lovely writing since i cannot even come close to being as talented as he is. **Go read the book!**

**Dedication: **To my lovely, regular reviewers who read _My Commensal_ literally right after I update it. This one's for you.

Enjoy!

* * *

"Hrmphh." Hana cocked his head and reexamined the blank paper in front of him. "Hrmphhhh." He closed his eyes and shoved his notebook away. "Hrmphh!"

"If you sigh one more time, I will sew your mouth shut," Anna Asakura (née Kyoyama) remarked, not bothering to even look up from the book she was reading.

Her son merely flinched, already immune after ten years of constant threats from his mother but still not foolish enough to igonore her comments.

"What's eating you, Hana?" Yoh called from the stove as he boiled some tea.

He flexed his legs under the table and yawned. "Well, for homework, Miss Jun wants us to write a history about our families, starting with our parents. And I didn't know where to start so I went up to the attic to find some documents or albums or somethin' but…all I found was this." He pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping and tossed it onto the dinner table.

Yoh padded over to where his wife and son were sitting and Anna craned her neck forward to read the faded 'MASSIVE DAMAGE TO TOKYO BUT NO WITNESS RECOLLECTION' that blared from the headlines. "I never heard of this at school…even though it happened the year I was born." He shrugged his shoulders and pocketed the old article. "Eh…it's probably not that important. It doesn't even have anything to do with our family." Yoh and Anna exchanged looks.

He rested his head on his hand and chewed the end of his pencil thoughtfully. "Say, how did you guys even meet?"

Yoh opened his mouth but his wife cut him off before he could even speak. "It's not that interesting. Or important." She sipped the freshly made tea Yoh had set out on the table.

Hana frowned, obviously not pleased with the response, and looked to his dad. "Er…" he trailed off as his son looked expectantly at him.

* * *

_"They were protected by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin."_

_

* * *

_Having finished washing his body down, she pushed herself up from her crouched position, faltering slightly as her swollen stomach weighed her down. She tried again, her cotton skirts billowing around her as she strode to the drawer to take out a new set of clothes she would dress him in.

His eyes fluttered open and he groaned. She snapped at him, telling him to go back to sleep, not even giving him the courtesy of looking at him when she spoke. He docilely complied and only when she heard the steady breathing of his sleep did she walk back to the bed and pull back the covers. The angry red scars mockingly smiled up at her from his naked body and she felt the instinctual need to retch as she began to pull the shirt over his chest.

She left him to rest and she exited the destroyed villa they had been staying at for nearly six months now and she made her way to the garden. She grumbled as she saw that rodents had eaten away almost a third of the small vegetable patch she and her patient had been living off of. She coldly told her unborn child to remind her to set twice as many traps later as she patted the bump in her midsection.

Anna retrieved the dented watering can she had happened to find carelessly disposed down the dirt road a month ago. She had been so overjoyed from this small stroke of luck that she had collapsed to the ground and probably would've stayed there if it weren't for the constant reminder of the sun setting. She proceeded about her daily routine of clawing at the hard dirt, the dark soil accumulating under her soft pale nails, placing her supply of seeds in the hole she had created, covering it and watering the heap.

* * *

_"What she was now was what she herself had decided to become_._"_

* * *

She wanted to stop. Neglect her duties. Run away and never come back. The war that had torn the world apart was over. But the simple fact that she had felt obligated to stay, obligated to care for her last patient tethered her to the ruined villa. The villa that she had come across as soldiers and troops from opposing sides lay strewn about the country but were united in the fact that they were all the same. That they were all shamans.

How the elders could get themselves out of this one was beyond her. This last war had taken it too far. Centuries before, shamans wouldn't have dared to reveal their powers to humans. Hundreds of years ago, they began showing just a few flashes of their abilities. In past decades, they held clashes in the same cities as the civilians, but still they had their limits: they only fought in the dead of night, when minimal humans were around to witness. Three years ago, every shaman in the world, regardless of age and ability had engaged in war as they were torn into two sides. They destroyed the world, not caring about their millennia old pact of keeping their existence a secret.

But it didn't matter to her. She was focused solely on the survival of herself and her patient.

* * *

_"Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying_..._Every damn general should have had my job…Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility…to know how to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable…those services they gave for the dead…Their vulgar rhetoric_._"_

* * *

She had become a nurse, healing people until they got to a state of contentment with dying, never able to cure anyone of their physical wounds. None of the nurses were able to. Anna hadn't been meant to be a nurse as she was sure more than half of the girls and women and injured men in the hospital weren't either. They had all received their training because they felt helpless. Unable to fight in the war but not passive enough to sit at home to wait to be destroyed.

She hated it when a patient died. She hated it when the higher ups sent their little lackeys to send their condolences to the families of the deceased soldier. She hated how she witnessed it. She hated how these men in uniform had to look at the letter in their hands to see who had died. How they didn't even know the name of the patient. She hated how they didn't know anything but acted like they knew everything like the omniscient force they presumed to be.

But most of all, she hated them because they took what was hers away.

When she first signed up to be a nurse, the hospital staff called her in for an examination. Anna knew she wasn't supposed to be a nurse. She was the exact opposite of it: her body was fragile and slight while her movements were rough. Her body needed to be rough and sturdy while her movements needed to be gentle. She wasn't meant to do this. But she wanted to regardless. The hospital staff told her with a frown that her body was too weak to handle the stress and constant work of being a nurse all day. Perhaps she would like to evacuate the country with the other people who were too weak to do anything instead.

That's when a boy came running in, his hands streaked with blood, his face streaked with tears, to tell them that the nurses out in the field had been killed.

They were happy to train Anna after that.

* * *

_"I was sick of the hunger…I wanted to go home and there was no one at home…After that I stepped so far back no one could get near me_._"_

* * *

At first, she was disoriented with all the death. The screams of the patients as they fought for their lives, morphine and chemicals artificially pumped into their veins, or as they died painfully. She was perpetually surrounded by the constant loss of life. Anna would walk down the hallways in a daze, long after she was off duty, staring at the bloodied patients, spirits hovering concernedly by their masters' bedsides. But one day, it stopped. She grew deaf to the horrified shrieks, blind to the blood seeping onto her uniform, insensitive to the corpses she had to wheel out to the back for grieving families and friends to identify. She withdrew, unconsciously knowing that that was the only way she was to survive.

After this turning point had occurred, Anna quickly rose to the top of her staff and became head nurse. Her efficiency grew while her fellow nurses were still held back by their tears over patients they had grown attached to. Two years she had done this. Two years she focused on nothing else but her work.

And then he was given leave from his duties for a week and he came back to see Anna. Yoh Asakura, the captain of the Asakura regiment. Yoh Asakura, one of the six leaders that had become a household name during the war. Yoh Asakura, her fiancée since they had been ten. He had been selected, according to the elders, by the Great Spirit to lead a section of the Anti-Reformation army. It was called that in opposition to the Reformation army. The army that his twin brother led. The remaining shamans had been spoon fed to believe that the Reformation army was bad. That the Anti-Reformation side was good.

Anna saw evil in both sides.

He came back only for a week before he had to return to the war. Anna let herself go and left no action undone, No word unsaid except for one. He asked her if she wanted him to stay. He told her if she didn't want him to return, he wouldn't. He would go AWOL and they'd run away somewhere. America, a country that the war hasn't touched yet. China, where Ren could shield them in the fortress he had built up. Anywhere but here. She said nothing and he went back to fighting.

* * *

_"Two lovers—starlight or moonlight, I don't remember. Everywhere else out there was a war_._"_

* * *

A few weeks later, she found out she was pregnant with his child.

A month later, Yoh was back in the hospital where she worked. Except this time, he was near death and covered in wounds.

She never forgave herself. When she saw him, she dropped the syringes she had been carrying and sunk to the floor, sitting in the morphine that leaked from the glass vials that had shattered. It was her fault. If only she had said yes, if only she had said those three letters, that one syllable, he'd still be with her. They could've been together. She had wanted to see him again, she had wanted to be together again. But not like this. Everyone became scared. The head nurse that had never shown any emotion for two years, the head nurse whom they depended on in times of crises, was now broken.

She never would've guessed she would be so affected by him.

* * *

_"How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled_._"_

* * *

The next week, a Wednesday if Anna wasn't mistaken, it stopped. Everything just stopped. The Reformation's leader simply disappeared and his armies fell to shambles as the Anti-Reformation forces quickly defeated them. The remaining patients either recovered or died. Families went home overjoyed or overcome with despair. The nurses went to Europe or America or mainland Asia to help out with the casualties and injuries there, where there was still some fighting left over. Or they went back to their lives, trying to eke out a living among the ruins of Tokyo.

Anna chose the latter option. She was told, on the day of her departure that the Anti-Reformation forces were now trying to rebuild the cities and restore the countryside as much as they could. The Patch elders were in the process of wiping the memories of the humans that had survived. Lady Sati, the captain of the Gandhara unit, was busy resurrecting as many civilians as she could. All this so that Japan could go back to how it was before this so called holy war. She was told to live elsewhere, somewhere more abandoned and away from cities for a few months until their reconstruction was over and it was safe to return.

She took her last patient, her fiancée, her father of her child and left. She never looked back.

* * *

_"And now, on this continent, the war having traveled elsewhere,…they hold the remnants of war societies… All around them now is the holy forest."_

_

* * *

_She never wanted to stop walking and went as far as she could without eating or drinking until one day she couldn't go any farther and took shelter in an abandoned villa.

For months, she cared for only herself and Yoh. For months, she corresponded with others, trying to find out information about the other leaders.

Jeanne, head of the X-LAWS, the French resurrection committee, had told her that Lyserg, captain of the Morphine unit and leader of the European Anti-Reformation was still alive but still trying to track down Hao.

Tamao, head nurse of the makeshift hospital in Hokkaido, didn't know the whereabouts of the captain of the Usui regiment Horohoro or his sister.

Jun, leader of the mainland Asian resurrection committee, said that Ren was off with the Tao unit to convene with Joco's Orona forces in America.

Anna stopped after that, relieved and contented that the five leaders were safe. But she had forgotten about the sixth.

* * *

_"All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy."_

_

* * *

_He had been marked. Discharged from his regiment without honor. Even if he had been the leader of his unit ever since the war started. He was left with nothing but the clothes on his back and his guardian spirits. So he started walking, asking people along the way for information. People who didn't want to be caught associating with a marked man.

He remembered his life before the war. He remembered the boy he had mentored and guided to becoming one of the greatest shamans before the fighting broke out. Before everyone became either an ally or an enemy to each other. He remembered laughing with his friends as he boasted about his newest pupil and they all compared the young shamans they had been assigned to.

Before he found out that the Patch, the tribe that started and controlled the entire Anti-Reformation movement was just as corrupt as their enemies.

He saw evil in both sides.

He had been released before he could do any substantial, actual damage to the Patch. He remembered the day he was notified of his marking, Jeanne had called and had been crying. The Great Spirit told of a time that when blood falls from a maiden's eyes, evil had arrived.

He remembered the possessive little girl that had been permanently attached to his pupil. She watched him warily and only later did she hesitatingly approach him when his guardian spirits appeared. She pointed at the buffalo and asked what it was.

"You've never seen a buffalo before?"

She stared at him.

"I heard that you've been corresponding with the girls."

She kept looking at him.

"About the other leaders."

Silence.

"You never asked about me."

The sixth leader.

"Are you going to ask me to come in?"

She slammed the door in his face.

* * *

_"She is always made to feel that she is the one how has found him, this man who knows darkness_."

* * *

"Yoh and I have been living off of the food I grow in the garden since I want to keep contact with humans to a minimum." She was hurriedly laying out pots and pans for that night's dinner. "I have some seeds and there are some dried fruits and meat in the tannery but…" She swept a lock of hair behind her ear as she turned to him. "Not enough for three people."

"I don't eat much. I'll manage somehow." He smiled at her.

"Why are you here?" She shook her head and went back to preparing supper. "Aren't you incredibly busy as the captain of the Patch division? There's still some fighting in America, according to Joco," Anna stated pointedly and coldly.

"I was…" He ran his tongue over the back of his teeth. He had hoped she wouldn't have asked. "I was…"

"You were _what_?"

"Discharged." He held up his hand to show her the star they had branded into the back of his hand. The same star that come to mean a whole slew of derogatory things because Hao's disciples used the same symbol.

"I'm sorry…Silva," she muttered, hesitantly saying his name after all of these years.

"Not your fault. Never your fault. Where's Yoh? Can I see him?" He scanned the room.

"No. He's resting right now." She studied him thoroughly, observed the way he looked after she had quickly shot down his hopes of seeing him. "You…" Her voice trailed off and after a few minutes had passed, it was evident she wasn't going to finish her thought.

"What?"

"You can see him later."

* * *

_"How much she is in love with him or he with her we don't know. Or how much it is a game of secrets_."

* * *

She mended the torn jacket he had been found in when he had been ambushed on a routine check of the perimeter. At first, Anna refused to believe that he could've been caught off guard that easily. That he was so weak as to be defeated by mere foot soldier shamans. Not even Peyote or Blocken or Kanna or any of the other captains or generals. She wanted to believe she trained him better than that.

"I sewed this for you. When we were fourteen. I remember that. I was so angry that Horohoro made fun of it. I beat the living shit out of him." She kept talking, as if she were narrating from a script. "And then you left for America without saying good bye to me. I wanted to beat the living shit out of you." She pricked herself with the needle and watched as the blood pooled out of the wound and seeped into the cloth, the blood quickly spreading through the fibers like water on paper. "I didn't understand why the Patch were building up their forces so early. I never would have guessed they had anticipated the war two years before it happened." The tiny pinprick stopped bleeding and she deftly tied a knot as she finished the stitch in his jacket. "It was your nineteenth birthday last month. Today it's mine." She placed the jacket on his bed and sat on the wooden chair, her hands protectively over her womb, before standing up to exit.

"I know, Anna."

She paused before opening the door. "Go back to sleep. You need to rest." Only when she exited outside did she realize that five tears had fallen from her eyes to the skirts of her dress. _One for every year we had been separated_, she thought bitterly as she disgustedly wiped her face and convinced herself that those weren't actual tears.

"Silva, I don't know how long you were standing there. I also don't know how long it took for you to find out where we were."

He stared at her.

"But what I do know is that you love Yoh."

He kept looking at her.

"However, I don't know if we love him in the same way." She brushed past the former Patch captain without looking at him. "Tell me, Silva, do you love Yoh as I love him?"

Silence.

"If you don't answer, I'm taking that as a yes."

The fiancée of the second most powerful shaman in the world.

"I had guessed you did. I don't care if you do as long as you don't act on it. But keep two things in mind. One, Yoh belongs to me. He is my fiancée. He is the father of my child. Two, I would advise you to get over this quickly. It will make everything much less complicated later on."

* * *

_"From this point on, we will either find or lose our souls_._"_

* * *

The Patch notified all the shamans through their oracle bells: it was done. They could go back to their former normal lives.

Or as normal as they could get.

Silva slipped out of their lives as quietly as he had entered them. Lady Sati, finally done with her duties as head of the resurrection committee and still obligated to Yoh when he had helped her unit out during the war, stopped by the villa to offer them her services. He recovered quickly after that and soon after, Anna gave birth to a baby boy.

Some years later, as she was walking around the outskirts of Tokyo, she found herself walking down a secluded dirt path, through the gates of an overgrown garden, and standing in front of gaping hole in the ground. The villa had been destroyed so no one could find out what exactly happened within its walls. To erase their existence from it. Anna had left her pain and suffering within it.

* * *

_"They were protected by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin."_

_

* * *

_"Mom? Dad?" Hana waved his hands in front of their faces. "Yeesh, I think they're broken."

Anna snapped out of it and glared at her son, causing him to shrink back. "What did you ask?"

"I-I-I-I asked how you and dad met—"

She cleared her throat and tried to keep her voice deadpan. "That depends on if you want to hear about the first time we met or the second time." She stood up while Yoh took the dirty cups and dishes to the sink before both went into the living room, leaving their very confused son behind in the kitchen.

Now she had nothing to be afraid of. Everything that mattered to her, that was important to her was finally

_Protected_.

* * *

**A/N: **hoo boy, I would love it if you reviewed! Would really make my day =)


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